Supreme Capitulation

The Trump Administration in Trump 2.0 has been typified by extremism, authoritarian crackdowns, reckless and illegal behavior that shatters norms, gestapo kidnappings in the streets, callous dismantling of federal agencies, and on and on. All of it clearly moving us towards an authoritarian and fascistic form of government, all fueled by a hateful Trump cult. It’s is been an extraordinary and upsetting process to watch, to see helpful government programs illegally dismantled by people explicitly, and publicly hell bent on destroying government’s function.  It’s an evil and unpopular agenda, fueled equally by insatiable greed and grievance.

Of course, evil and unpopular is not the same as illegal (see previous American presidents for details), but in this case Trump and his cronies, including erstwhile allies like Musk, have been so brazen and move so quickly that it was clear how profoundly illegal and unconstitutional these activities have been, and in both the courts of opinion and law, Trump was roundly rebuked.

Tragically, instead of listening to the people, or standing up for the constitution, our other branches of government, including Congress and the Supreme Court, have been back-filling to retroactively make the illegal actions of the Trump Administration technically legal. We’ve already discussed how Congress threw in its support for Trump with the big ugly bill, but perhaps even more crucially we’ve now seen the total partisan capitulation of the SCOTUS in its latest series of political motivated “jurisprudence,” effectively giving Trump his the Republican administration the legal cover for their destructive actions.

Those who briefly believed the Supreme Court would be some sort of ally against Trump must have forgotten who list six of those Supreme Court Justices were picked from. This is not a court that honestly grapples with the intricacies of the law on behalf of the people, but instead contorts law and reason to support decisions already made by the “conservative” justices.

In just this last session, SCOTUS has issued a series of devastating, and often incredible decisions issues ranging from on birthright citizenship and immigration,trans-rights/personhood, separation of church and state, Medicaid funding bans and mass firings.

In these decisions SCOTUS constantly reaffirm Trump's ability to act with impunityand flout the constitution and the law. It is an about face from how the court treated the executive branch during the Biden Administration. The court clearly has a totally different standard for Republicans and the conservative ideology than it does for any sort of pro-people policies, or even for the universal rule of law itself.

The Supreme Court of the United States, as it is currently constituted, is not an ally. Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito to Brett Kavanaugh have captured by right wing billionaires and monied interests and do not serve the people of the United States from the bench.

In order to get the government that American’s need we are going to need political and economic power that can stand up to the executive and judicial branches and the donor class that funds them. Recent examples like Zoran Mamdani show that it is possible to unite people around the popular policies we talk about every week. However, even if we get good politicians into positions of power, we should expect SCOTUS to block efforts by the government to help its citizens. It is up to us to build the political and economic might to force the court to reconsider, just like at the end of the Lochner era in 1936 under FDR. This is going to be a long road, and we're in it for the long haul. So, join us each Tuesday in growing solidarity as we build towards a representative government that takes on all the centers of power from the authoritarian executive to the feckless Congress, to the compromised and politically partisan Supreme Court.

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